Hey, it's me, Matt Whitman from the Future. Again, I figure if you're here on episode two of the podcast, it means that you've gone all the way back to the beginning. You listened to the first one, you're thinking like, uh, maybe this will become a part of the thing that I do. Maybe I'll build this into my commute, make it a part of my workout time, or store it up for the weekend when I'm mowing the lawn or whatever it is you might do. Look, that is awesome of you to even consider it. And I'm super grateful, and that's why I wanted to jump back in here and say, thanks for trying out a second episode. I really appreciate it. Also, I wanted to encourage you again. Think about the story that you know the very, very best of all of the stories ever. It's a movie or a book. When I was a kid, I memorized the entire Princess Bride because it was a sad, sad, sad little boy, and also because it's a really good movie. And I got that story in my hip pocket. I know it frontwards and backwards. Well, the Bible is one of those things that a lot of times we imagine, you know, you just get the highlights, the little bits about making sure you don't do naughty things, or the very best quips from Jesus, or the most interesting, miraculous claims, or bold, bloody stories and things like that. But again, my friend, the invitation here is to something much more than that. I want you and I to understand one book of the Bible for now, Matthew, as well as you understand the most familiar story to you in all of your life. I think it can be done. And I think once you get to that level, you start to really appreciate the beauty and see the depth of this thing that maybe escapes us if we take a more surfacey or quick-paced approach. So thank you again for being here and giving it a listen. I hope it turns out to be a long haul thing for you and I. All right, here's the second episode. Alright, pop quiz. Who is your favorite, who is, I should say, the most interesting character in Star Wars? I'm gonna give you five, four, three, two, one. You said Han Solo, right? Come on, if you didn't, don't admit that to anybody. It's obviously Han Solo. Part of that has to do with how Harrison Ford handles the role, part of that has to do with really being a pretty well-written character, and a lot of that has to do with Han Solo just being an example in a long line of historical examples of the rogue with the heart of gold archetype. He's the guy who is a scoundrel, but he's got all the talent in the world, all the charm in the world, but he doesn't use it for good stuff. He weaponizes it for personal selfish gain. He doesn't believe in anything bigger than himself. And you look at that person, you're like, oh, if that person just believed in something, they could do incredible things. They would be like my best friend ever. But you know, you can't trust them because they're uh a rogue and a scoundrel and a vest. And then something happens in Star Wars. And this is the thing that you want maybe the most of anything is to see that guy come around. And when he shows up in the trench run in episode four and bails out Luke, and if you don't know what any of this means, you've you're fine. You don't need to know Star Wars stuff. But if you do, you're tracking. It's a great moment because the hero gets bailed out, but he gets bailed out by the person you wanted to see change the most. You get that satisfaction. And what happens after that is that we get a Han Solo who is still a little bit of a scoundrel, but all of those character traits are now pointed at something bigger than himself that matters. Well, in the Gospel of Matthew, we run into this character, Matthew, who also happens to be the author of the book of Matthew, who I think is the exact same kind of guy. If you go to St. John's Lateran, the great big Catholic church in Rome proper, it's the most impressive Catholic structure outside of St. Peter's you'll ever see. And you go in there and it's it's a hall of disciples. And so you get, you know, all of these guys, I don't think Judas got a statue, but everybody else gets a big giant triple size, larger than life, granite or marble statue, and they're all looking down on you with their enormous beards and muscles because they're all that kind of Renaissance era idealization. And you get to Matthew, and he doesn't look like somebody you could relate to. He doesn't look like a scoundrel. He looks like almost a minor Greek god. And I think it's really easy when we picture the disciples to imagine the best Christians, the best religious people, the best humans ever. But they weren't, and you know this, I mean they were all screwy and had weird quirks and everything else. But I find Matthew's story the most compelling. I like his story so much because he is the Han Solo of the Bible. He is a complete sellout and traitor to his team. He only cares about himself and his own stuff, and then he encounters something that really matters and it changes the way he sees everything. To be specific, and we'll get to this as we work through the book of Matthew eventually. The deal is this Matthew was a tax collector, a member of this subclass kind of in the middle of Roman society called a publicani. That was the class. The tax collection system was, I don't know, I guess you'd have to say worse than it is now. Uh, I don't want to be political and offend people who really, really like getting taxed, but it's pretty screwy and arbitrary now, even, but it was even screwier and arbitrarier in the first century AD. Because what happened is Rome emerged out of the Italian peninsula a few centuries before the time of Jesus, and they learned from some of the mistakes of their predecessors. And so what they would do is they would go and conquer these different kingdoms, these different nations, and then they would allow a local ethnic ruler to remain in place. Sometimes they would call that an ethnarch or a client king. And this client king's job was to provide order and make sure the taxes got paid. And what they found was it made the bitter pill of Roman occupation go down much easier for most people groups, because these people groups still felt like they were being ruled by someone who was a part of them, or maybe even an extension of the dynasty that was conquered by the Romans in the first place. And so that setup is present in the first century, in Galilee, in Judea, in what we would call modern-day Israel. And so the work of collecting taxes then was one where Rome, I think, wanted a little bit of insulation, so that even though they knew dang well they were the bad guys, maybe they wouldn't be so much the bad guys. And who wants to oversee a complex network of tax collection and codes when instead you could just do it the way they did it, which was to find some people who were well connected locally, give them basically a 007 license to tax, and send them out and be like, hey, we expect to get about this much in taxation from you in your region. That's really all we have for you. Good luck, go get them. There was kind of a wink, wink, nod, nod acceptance that these tax collectors would go out and shake people down for whatever, Rome's portion as well as their portion. This was a good system for Rome. It was frankly a pretty good system for a local ruler or an ethnarch as well, but it was a horrible system for whoever was getting taxed because you get this weasel coming to your door and demanding money and you have no idea how much money you actually owe. How could they actually know what you earned or what you have or anything? And you just had to pay it. And if you didn't, that weasel had the force of occupying Roman law behind him. So if an outsider were recruited to come into Galilee or Judea and collect these kind of taxes, that would be one thing. But it's quite another thing to have somebody who is you, talks like you and looks like you, and you know the guy's parents, and you remember where he went to high school, and now he just sided with the oppressor and he takes your money. Think about how you feel when you have to write a check for something that you feel is unjust or wrong. Where you got over a barrel from somebody who did business in a shady way with you, or maybe it is just the check that you write in April if you're in my country and you're like, that just I doesn't seem right. That's uh I don't like the way the taxes are spent, that was too much. It's bitter, but it's not personal. It doesn't feel human usually when you get shaken down in that way. You just feel um a general angst maybe about the world, and then you get over it and get on with it. But here there was a face to resent, which again, brilliant move on the part of Rome to give the people somebody to dislike. And that face was Matthew. And so we get the account in Matthew chapter nine, something we'll look at way more in depth down the road, of this guy who's sitting at his little adorable tax collection booth in a town where he knew a whole bunch of other people from other towns would have to come and do business at an intersection where he knew they would have to walk by. And, you know, I'm sure everybody walked by that guy with their hoodie pulled over their face or trying to act distracted and look the other way and hoping he wouldn't notice them and call them out. But instead of Matthew, the sell-out traitor to his own religion and his own people calling somebody out and flagging them down and making them come over and pay tribute, he instead gets called out and flagged down. And you know what? I was gonna just like get into actual Bible content later, but I have one of these right here. Matthew 9 9. As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and quote sinners came and ate with him and his disciples, and when the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and quote sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said, It's not the healthy you need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners. So Matthew is Han Solo. He gets called out, he gets flagged down in a way that is very subtly, thematically appropriate for what his job and his gig has been. And the calling is incredible. I mean, and Matthew is writing this book. The most pivotal thing in his entire life happens, and the way he describes it is Jesus was like, follow me. He told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. How would you tell the story of the most pivotal thing that's ever happened in your life? I'm guessing you would get into all the details and talk about how you felt, and it would be this big dramatic epic where you or I or the star of our own story. And yeah, that's how we that's how we tell stories. So why would Matthew do it like this? Well, because he had been following one master that he'd been weaseling for, and then he got called out in the light by a master that was actually worth following, and the master was the entire point, not Matthew. So he doesn't give us his whole story, he doesn't obsess about himself because the conversion was as simple as Jesus saying, Follow me, and Matthew was like, Yep, alright, I'm in. And guess what? People didn't like it. It's weird and they push back on it, but Jesus made it clear I didn't come here to get the impressive, self-assured people who are already sure they're right about everything. I came here to call the people who are broken and messed up and over a barrel and on trains they can't possibly get off of. And that's why that's why Matthew is suddenly along for the ride. So I think it's important to start by understanding a little bit about the character who's writing the book that we're about to spend a bunch of time with. I think it's really important to start by further understanding what that character thought about the main character of his book, who is Jesus. And we get a pretty good indication from this little conversion story. And then we also just get this big awesome biblical thought on the way out the door that Jesus is fully and keenly aware of people's screwed-upedness, and that's exactly why he showed up to seek and save the lost. I don't know, I don't mean to get to the personal application here, but that's a very helpful thing to remember and bear in mind as we just go through the moments of life and the beats of success and failure. Is that before the foundation of the earth was put in place, we're talking about a God here who holds himself out as having known exactly everything that would be weird and off and wrong about us, and still showed up at our little metaphorical tax collector's booth and called us out of that situation and into the situation where we follow him. So, we're looking at the book of Matthew. We're gonna get into more nuts and bolts of the authorship and date of authorship and that kind of stuff in the next conversation. But I think it's a cool place to start to look at Han Solo, Matthew, rogue, archetype, turned from caring only about himself and stupid stuff to caring about something that matters. Okay, more on Matthew tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.